Capturing The Spring Break Crowd

COVER STORY

Popular Destinations Trying To Find Ways To Lure 'Right' Students

DAYTONA BEACH — The year was 1962. A group of Daytona Beach business people wanted badly to attract some of the college students who had been flocking to Fort Lauderdale each year during spring break.

The Daytonans were so eager they organized an unorthodox marketing ploy: They arranged for thousands of ping-pong balls to be dropped into the ocean just offshore from their South Florida rival. Each ball bore a not-so-subtle inscription exhorting students to ''Get on the ball and come to Daytona Beach.''

Despite that stunt and others, including bus tours to college campuses, it took Daytona more than 20 years to usurp Fort Lauderdale as the state's spring break mecca.

Daytona didn't hold the title long. Last year - just six years after the community's largest spring break yet - Panama City Beach attracted almost three times as many spring break students as Daytona.

Because spring break pumped an estimated $120 million into the Daytona area's economy at its peak, many in the community would like to recapture at least some of that lost business.

Therein lies a difficult task: As community leaders learned in the '60s and '70s, it's no cinch to find the right marketing tools to reach spring breakers. It's even more problematic when the community wants to gear its message toward ''the right kind'' of students - rather than simply rolling out a welcome mat for the party animals of the world.

For many years, the Halifax Area Advertising Authority, which supervises the spending of northeast Volusia County's resort-tax revenue, has been the primary funding source for spring break marketing efforts in the community. Dick Moores, the authority's chairman, said experience has been a poor teacher when it comes to deciding how much to spend on spring break - or what produces the best results.

''That is exactly the problem,'' Moores said. ''Do you throw money at spring break? And does it do any good? It's absolutely impossible to track.''

Clearly, marketing does reach some students.

Tiffany-Paige Crespi and Irene Belinsky, students at Rutgers University, remember seeing many advertisements for various spring break destinations posted on campus bulletin boards. They also remember MTV's spring break broadcasts from Daytona Beach a couple of years ago.

They were sold on Daytona Beach because of price comparisons.

''It (Daytona) is the most affordable and accessible,'' Crespi said. ''Everyone says Daytona is a good place to go.''

Of course, there are also students who find their way to Daytona without the help of any form of direct advertising, like University of Kentucky student Seth Burnett. Burnett and his caravan of friends decided to spend a few days in Daytona because they knew the community's reputation through word-of-mouth.

Charles Hauswald, another University of Kentucky student, ended up in Daytona this spring because a friend had a time-share condominium there.

Where the boys were

Compared with Daytona, Fort Lauderdale's reign as a spring break capital came fairly easily. The Broward County community became a favorite destination for students almost by accident - back when it was just about the only choice.

Students first visited Fort Lauderdale in large numbers during the mid-1930s for a swimming competition called the Collegiate Aquatic Forum. Without any organized marketing effort, the numbers of visiting students grew steadily during the next two decades.

In a 1959 Time magazine article, one female student gave a simple explanation for choosing Fort Lauderdale during spring break: ''This is where the boys are,'' she said, inadvertently creating the now-famous catch phrase that also is the title of a novel and a 1960 movie about Fort Lauderdale.

The growth continued until 1985, when 350,000 students - many of them rowdy - overran Fort Lauderdale and prompted widespread community backlash. Only then did the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention and Visitors Bureau hire a marketing firm - M. Silver Associates Inc. of New York - to devise a campaign intended to discourage spring breakers from visiting the community.

''There was no design to create spring break'' in Fort Lauderdale, said Virginia Sheridan, president of M. Silver Associates. ''It did produce a lot of business for the city, but the community eventually soured on it.''

That's when Daytona Beach's marketing efforts, which had been moderately successful to that point, really took hold. An estimated 400,000 students flocked to Daytona in 1989 - bringing a lot of business to local merchants, and a lot of headaches.

Just as their counterparts in Fort Lauderdale had done before them, some Daytona residents began calling for a crackdown on spring break rowdiness. Attendance started a downward spiral - from an estimated 280,000 students in 1990 to 160,000 last year.